Exiting Asia

I met Nit ten months ago, in the heavy heat of a Bangkok afternoon as I walked from my guest house to the train station. He was leaning on the fence alongside a filthy canal that was choked with plastic and smelling like open sewage and industrial chemicals. He had a fishing pole next to him, with a line in the water and as I got closer, he hooked into something big. After five minutes, he pulled a four pound carp onto the greasy sidewalk, and looked up, beaming.

“Nice work!” I said in Thai.
“He’s a fat one,” he said. “What are you doing for dinner? Will you eat him with me?” Looking at the fish gasping on the sidewalk and the bracken water that spawned it, I was quietly happy to have other plans.

Nit was a handsome man, 28, with long black hair and leathery hands blackened from his work as an auto mechanic. He was from Issan, the agricultural province of northern Thailand. He’d come to Bangkok give years ago, looking for work, and had only returned once because the bus fare is expensive. He missed home. Though he’s older than the average marrying age here, Nit hasn’t taken a wife. “I don’t like the Bangkok girls,” he told me. “They’re too stuck-up. I like English girls because of their beautiful noses.”

Most mornings Nit wakes up early and walks to work in the mechanic shop to make a few dollars in a day’s labor. But not today. He got drunk last night, so he came out fishing instead. He’s a smart man, and has studied some English, but he rarely has a chance to use it, so he forgets. He wanted to know about where I was from. How long it took me to get here, and how much it cost.

“I want to go to Egypt one day,” he told me. “Have you ever been? I want to see the pyramids and Pharaoh’s tomb.” He was a proud man, opening his dreams like a lunchbox in a lion’s den, because, if he didn’t guard them like hell, everything around him – the trash-clogged canal, the paddy-land of his birth and the grease-stained hands he escaped to – would pluck them from him so quick he wouldn’t even feel the sting of the hook.

The fish was still slapping its tail on the pavement at Nit’s feet when I said goodbye. I had a train to catch. Nit shook my hand and wished me good luck, and I swear it was the most sincere I’ve ever heard those two words sound.

***
It’s now been a year since I left America, made the first journey of these travels and wrote the first words of these stories. I want to thank you all for your comments and e-mails and encouragement throughout the year. Due to sickness, other obligations and perhaps a bit of laziness as well, my posts have not always been regular. For the past two months I was on holiday in northern India with my beautiful girlfriend, and happily indisposed.

It’s been an eventful and valuable year in which I learned a lot about myself, the world and journalism. Over the course of it I was tailed by Burmese spies, arrested by the Kabul Counter-Terrorism Police Force, and embedded with a rebel army in the Golden Triangle. But I also simply sweated with people on Indian trains, shared food with families in Laos and talked about girls with taxi drivers in Thailand. And I suppose, at the end of it, I learned more about humanity from the mundane than manic. This morning I talked to a woman at a coffee stand in Bangkok with two young boys, whom she named Wind and Surf respectively. In the midst of one dusty journey in the central highlands of Afghanistan, a young man gave me his hat after I bought him a pomegranate juice.

Make no mistake, these are profound times – the global economy is crashing, the climate is warming and over the course of our lives the diminishing oil supply will rapidly change the way in which we live. But amidst these headlines, often the most revealing news, about who we are and how we live, fails to make the ticker. The stereotypical journalist is a cynical story-teller, already five drinks into the evening in bars throughout the world – pick up a newspaper and it’s easy to see why. But, perhaps unlike them, I feel more hopeful at the end of this journey than I did at the start.

Two hours ago I was driven to the Bangkok Airport by a taxi driver named Somphong. Like Nit, he was also from Thailand’s Issan province, a country boy who came to the city to find work. Somphong liked to talk. He started by having a good laugh about the beguiling nature of Osama bin Laden. “Isn’t that strange! The most advanced country in the world, and they still can’t catch him! That guy is strong! The police and the FBI are catching people all the time, but they can’t get that guy. It’s incredible!”

I learned more about Somphong as we sped down the freeways, over the bypasses and under the flyovers; the arteries of a city of nine million that can look like a terrifyingly beautiful matchbox car racing course. Somphong would lay down his vote for John McCain, if anyone asked it of him, because he’s old and level-headed. He wants to fly in an airplane one day. He likes Lao girls because they’re short and have big breasts. He talked about Burma, too.

“It’s a bad government, but it’s preserved some things. Look at Thailand,” he said, taking in the giant movie posters, the luxury cars, the smog and the noise in one sweep of his hand. “It’s developed, but there’s no nature anymore. It’s comfortable, but it’s stressful. Burma may have a bad government, but they still have their culture.”

There was some truth in what he was saying, another lesson on how the world defies explanation. But by then we were near the airport, and Somphong stopped talking to point out a giant Boeing-747 coming in for a landing. “Oh, look at it fall,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. “The pilot better get it right, or they’re all going to die!” Just before it landed, in his glee, he made a sound like a duck and we both laughed.